FortWhyte Alive

Signage

FortWhyte Alive offers 640 acres of protected urban greenspace and serves as many things to many people. It is a nature centre, a wildlife refuge, and an environmental educational organization — as well as a place for quiet reflection. With so much beauty to explore, FortWhyte has become an award-winning destination for outdoor experiences for adults, students, and children of every age. The organization offers a wide array of programs that help foster sustainability in the community — even housing the largest solar panel array in Winnipeg. (Fun fact: Manoverboard rents the centre’s boardroom for our regular retreats.)

Much of FortWhyte Alive’s conservation and environmental programming is made possible by its passionate donors, partners and sponsors. These supporters include individuals, businesses, and government. A few dollars make a huge difference in delivering innovative programming. Historically, FortWhyte honoured donations with a traditional donor wall at the entrance to the visitor centre. Small and hard-to-read brass plaques engraved with names covered the wall and these became increasingly difficult to update, organize and manage. The centre approached us to design and build a compelling, customized, and more sustainable digital solution.

The new donor wall would comprise of three new vertical digital displays mounted edge to edge as a triptych in the foyer of the centre. FortWhyte looked to Manoverboard to provide a design solution that was compatible with both their hardware and software and that would be easy to maintain over the coming years. The chosen screen presentation platform, Rise Vision, allowed for a single design to span across all three displays at once or individually on each one of the panels. Our goal was to ensure that copy was legible regardless of visitors’s viewpoints when standing before the donor wall. (Part of the design challenge was keeping in mind that, while the bezel of each individual display was narrow, it was not fully seamless when mounted together; we had to anticipate how screens with smaller text would appear when spanning across multiple displays.)

To build the new digital donor wall for FortWhyte, we first created a design system of one-, two- and three-panel templates that could be easily populated with text and images via Rise Vision. We used very large, legible and open source typefaces that could span across screens to display the donation types and contribution levels. We ensured that smaller text for donors would be safely contained within a single panel to maintain readability. We then developed a user-friendly online means to manage and update the vast variety of donor information, including names of individuals, organizations, and government agencies. FortWhyte Alive administrators would be able to update a single Google spreadsheet from any computer with an internet connection and that data would be fed to a Rise Vision presentation dynamically, with font styling intact. Large, beautiful photographs of people enjoying FortWhyte — along with native animals and landscapes — are featured throughout the presentation, creating a dynamic donor wall that clearly illustrates to visitors how their donations directly benefit the organization.

The setup Manoverboard provided has magnified our capacity to feature donors and sponsors and simplified and streamlined our donor recognition process. What often took weeks to update is often accomplished in a matter of minutes at very little cost. A custom digital donor wall is a real game changer.